Reading Response 4

My first experience programming was with an audio programming language, albeit with a different one than ChucK, as well as a unique set of mentors and prior world experiences, as is the case for any human being. These things, as discussed throughout “Artful Design,” necessarily causes a combination of similar and different ways of thinking about sound design to those presented in chapter 4 of the book. This is best summed up in the chapter’s principle 4.7, “Aesthetics is not a passive thing-- but an active agent of design!” Thus, I found it a fun exercise to examine these similarities and differences in real-time as I read through this chapter, in order to deepen my understanding of both ChucK and, in a broader sense, my prior approaches to musical creation.

Immediately, the Max Matthews quote leading to principle 4.1 gives me pause in an interesting way: ARE a majority of sounds actually “harsh, abrasive, or downright annoying?” I would (personally) argue not from statistics: most sounds built with an arbitrary sequence of numbers are going to sound pretty close to white noise, and only a few will come close to repeating periodically. People fall asleep to white noise, so I don’t think you can describe it super well with any of those adjectives. This difference in approaches to the infinite possibility-space of sound definitely comes more from our prior experiences with sound and beliefs about the universe than one musical tool or another, but Ge’s response to this infinite possibility on the same page clarifies something about an aesthetic choice that it seems ChucK encourages: imbuing nuance directly into a sound, rather than digging it out of some pre-existing and/or conceptual sound. Both approaches are equally wonderful, and I think my leaning towards one or the other is a result of my history affecting my approach to my tools, rather than those tools affecting my aesthetic preferences. This does raise an interesting question though: what is the limit of the things we make to in turn make us? This thought exercise causes me to think there is such a limit, but I don’t yet entirely know where it lies.

On the other hand, principles 4.5 and onward felt very familiar to me from the tools other than ChucK that I’ve tended to use for musical creation in the past. The practice of focusing on things in computer music that would otherwise be impossible or painful outside of a computer, or that act as creative transformations and arrangements of outside sounds and information is, I believe, strongly encouraged by both the design of ChucK and of the other computer music tools I’ve most often gravitated towards. These ideas seem to me to get at the core essence of computers as an artistic tool, which can potentially point to a computer-specific answer to the general question of our tools’ bounds of influence.

More importantly, however, the rest of the chapter shows that the bounds of our tools’ influence is tied to how we interact with them. These interactions can for example range from how possible it is to “experiment to illogical extremes” with our tools, or how procrastinate-able those tools are, and computers seem to take each of these possibilities as far as possible, which can at first make them seem like slightly spooky tools. The best answer to this “spookiness” that I’ve heard comes from my mentor Bruno Ruviaro, in his typical gentle fashion: “If a computer is an instrument, that means you should be able to jam with it.” That is where I’d guess the limit of our tools’ ability to alter us lies: every musical tool permits jamming, and jamming exists in all of us extrinsically to the tools we use. As the end of the chapter puts it, the art lies in what we do.